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Do I start by expressing my disappointment in chef Susur Lee, who seems to have lost his touch at the Dundas St. W. restaurant he opened with his sons Kai and Levi Bent-Lee?

Do I try and capture the horror of eating such nauseating combinations as gorgonzola with oranges?

Or do I focus on how little fun is to be had in a crowded dining room that reaches 93 decibels by 7:30 p.m. on a Wednesday? It’s like trying to converse on an airport runway.

Regardless, the seven-week-old restaurant is more broken than merely bent.

Bent takes its name from Brenda Bent, Susur’s wife and mother of Levi and Kai. She did the decor, cladding the one-time Portuguese sports bar in white subway tiles and her signature kitsch. Her Neverland design is the best part of the experience. The back wall is covered in the toys her sons once played with; the bathrooms used to play with; bathrooms display school photos from the 1970s. Childhood isn’t over here.

It could, and should, be so much better. Susur Lee is a master of Asian fusion cuisine, setting the gold standard 25 years ago at Lotus by finding the harmony between French technique and the Hong Kong ingredients of his youth.

Despite closing two restaurants in Toronto and one in New York, the 53-year-old Lee still draws crowds at Lee and Lee Lounge on King St. W.

Sons Levi, 22, and Kai, 20, got him to expand to hip and happening Dundas West. They are Lee’s link to the social-media generation and run the place. The trio collaborated on the global shared-plates menu.

“Creating this menu was a different experience for him because we were involved,” Kai Bent-Lee says of his father.

The kitchen-sink approach at Bent is less fusion and more Bedlam. I count six competing components in the single regrettable mouthful that is the complimentary dessert, a so-called “Chinese doughnut” so round and rubbery it should be enshrined on the back wall with the other toys.

Asian chicken dumplings ($16) are horrific, dry inside and served with goat cheese sauce, chorizo and pesto. It’s as if France, Portugal and Italy declared war on China.

I wish the kitchen — led by chef de cuisine Bryan Gunness — would focus on balancing flavours instead of hitting us over the head with them.

The Peruvian-style ceviche ($16) is particularly crude, red snapper fillets cowering under a thatch of red onions in a sea of lime juice. “Chef recommends you use a spoon,” says the server.

There’s little of Susur’s finesse, his discipline in blending culturally disparate ingredients. I’ve reviewed three of his restaurants and found his food to be complicated, seamless and, as he has gone down-market, progressively disappointing. At Bent, Susur is at his lowest yet. I fear he’s jumped the shark’s-fin soup.

To their credit, staff eventually ask why we’re not finishing our food, then take the most offensive dish off the bill.

It’s hardly better on a subsequent visit, even with Susur working behind the sushi bar alongside a pair of Japanese-trained chefs. They turn out standard nigiri ($17) amped up by no-brainer Japanese ingredients like shiso and yuzu.

On my second visit, staff recommended each diner order three dishes, up from two on my first visit. The best of them are a balanced green curry soup ($7) and a quartet of chipotle-spiked smoked cod tacos ($15) with shells cleverly made from crisp taro slices.

The rest, though, is like a bad parody of fusion. Shanghai pork belly ($19) comes with a cold and gritty romano bean purée. It reaches the height of ridiculousness with the aforementioned combination of fresh oranges and gorgonzola in an onion tart ($10) that curdles in my mouth.

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